“I wasn’t going to say anything about Fred and George!” she said in an injured voice.
Ron snorted disbelievingly and Hermione threw him a very dirty look.
“No, I wasn’t!” she said angrily. “As a matter of fact, I was going to ask Harry when he’s going to go back to Snape and ask for Occlumency lessons again!”
Harry’s heart sank. Once they had exhausted the subject of Fred and George’s dramatic departure, which admittedly had taken many hours, Ron and Hermione had wanted to hear news of Sirius. As Harry had not confided in them the reason he had wanted to talk to Sirius in the first place, it had been hard to think of things to tell them. He had ended up saying to them truthfully that Sirius wanted Harry to resume Occlumency lessons. He had been regretting this ever since; Hermione would not let the subject drop and kept reverting to it when Harry least expected it.
“You can’t tell me you’ve stopped having funny dreams,” Hermione said now, “because Ron told me last night you were muttering in your sleep again . . .”
Harry threw Ron a furious look. Ron had the grace to look ashamed of himself.
“You were only muttering a bit,” he mumbled apologetically. “Something about ‘just a bit farther.’”
“I dreamed I was watching you lot play Quidditch,” Harry lied brutally. “I was trying to get you to stretch out a bit farther to grab the Quaffle.”
Ron’s ears went red. Harry felt a kind of vindictive pleasure: He had not, of course, dreamed anything of the sort.
Last night he had once again made the journey along the Department of Mysteries corridor. He had passed through the circular room, then the room full of clicking and dancing light, until he found himself again inside that cavernous room full of shelves on which were ranged dusty glass spheres. . . .
He had hurried straight toward row number ninety-seven, turned left, and ran along it. . . . It had probably been then that he had spoken aloud. . . . Just a bit farther . . . for he could feel his conscious self struggling to wake . . . and before he had reached the end of the row, he had found himself lying in bed again, gazing up at the canopy of his four-poster.
“You are trying to block your mind, aren’t you?” said Hermione, looking beadily at Harry. “You are keeping going with your Occlumency?”
“Of course I am,” said Harry, trying to sound as though this question was insulting, but not quite meeting her eye. The truth was that he was so intensely curious about what was hidden in that room full of dusty orbs that he was quite keen for the dreams to continue.
The problem was that with just under a month to go until the exams and every free moment devoted to studying, his mind seemed saturated with information when he went to bed so that he found it very difficult to get to sleep at all. When he did, his overwrought brain presented him most nights with stupid dreams about the exams. He also suspected that part of his mind — the part that often spoke in Hermione’s voice — now felt guilty on the occasions it strayed down that corridor ending in the black door, and sought to wake him before he could reach journey’s end.
“You know,” said Ron, whose ears were still flaming red, “if Montague doesn’t recover before Slytherin play Hufflepuff, we might be in with a chance of winning the Cup.”
“Yeah, I s’pose so,” said Harry, glad of a change of subject.
“I mean, we’ve won one, lost one — if Slytherin lose to Hufflepuff next Saturday —”
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Harry, losing track of what he was agreeing to: Cho Chang had just walked across the courtyard, determinedly not looking at him.
The final match of the Quidditch season, Gryffindor versus Ravenclaw, was to take place on the last weekend of May. Although Slytherin had been narrowly defeated by Hufflepuff in their last match, Gryffindor was not daring to hope for victory, due mainly (though of course nobody said it to him) to Ron’s abysmal goalkeeping record. He, however, seemed to have found a new optimism.
“I mean, I can’t get any worse, can I?” he told Harry and Hermione grimly over breakfast on the morning of the match. “Nothing to lose now, is there?”
“You know,” said Hermione, as she and Harry walked down to the pitch a little later in the midst of a very excitable crowd, “I think Ron might do better without Fred and George around. They never exactly gave him a lot of confidence . . .”
Luna Lovegood overtook them with what appeared to be a live eagle perched on top of her head.
“Oh gosh, I forgot!” said Hermione, watching the eagle flapping its wings as Luna walked serenely past a group of cackling and pointing Slytherins. “Cho will be playing, won’t she?”
Harry, who had not forgotten this, merely grunted.
They found seats in the second to topmost row of the stands. It was a fine, clear day. Ron could not wish for better, and Harry found himself hoping against hope that Ron would not give the Slytherins cause for more rousing choruses of “Weasley Is Our King.”
Lee Jordan, who had been very dispirited since Fred and George had left, was commentating as usual. As the teams zoomed out onto the pitches he named the players with something less than his usual gusto.
“. . . Bradley . . . Davies . . . Chang,” he said, and Harry felt his stomach perform, less of a back flip, more a feeble lurch as Cho walked out onto the pitch, her shiny black hair rippling in the slight breeze. He was not sure what he wanted to happen anymore, except that he could not stand any more rows. Even the sight of her chatting animatedly to Roger Davies as they prepared to mount their brooms caused him only a slight twinge of jealousy.